Tell me your views

[carollewis]

I am writing a new series for The Times about self employed workers/micro businesses. The first of which looks at the issue of generalists verus specialists.

Many commentators predict that in the future, especially in the IT world, companies will hold a core group of generalist employees and augment them on a project-by-project basis with specialised contractors/freelance/consultant workers.

I'd like to find people willing to talk to me (for inclusion in the article) about this topic including how you differentiate yourself without closing off potential channels of work and how you pick, evolve, develop and refine your niche.

I won't just pick up random comments and put them in the paper. Comments posted here on the forum will be great as general (non attributable) background information. But I will organise a telephone interviews with those willing to talk to me on the record for inclusion in the article.

I look forward to hearing from you

Many thanks

Carol Lewis
Business Features Editor, The Times

[realityhack]

Welcome to CUK Carol. If you don't mind I'll ask admin to check your IP (To see if you are who you say you are) and see if we can open up private messaging for you in case serious respondents wish to remain anonymous.

Good luck with your series - they can be boisterous in General, but amongst the chatter there's a fair few seasoned contractors who know their onions.

RH

[cojak]

As a well respected and seasoned professional

I'd be more than happy to talk to you.


(she does know this is a public forum full of anonymous loons, doesn't she....)


<looks around for malvolio/v8gaz to make an appearance>

[MaryPoppins]

Many commentators predict that in the future, especially in the IT world, companies will hold a core group of generalist employees and augment them on a project-by-project basis with specialised contractors/freelance/consultant workers.

Isn't this what happens already, like?

[realityhack]

Isn't this what happens already, like?

It's what already happens in the (design) agency world with contractors/freelancers. Not too sure about that here, in bigbankco. We've 000's of IT permies.

[MarillionFan]

No micro businesses here only disguised employees

Hector

[TykeMerc]

If suitably motivated I'd be happy to make some time to chat.

[xchaotic]

The truth is it's already happening, but while I like to sell myself as an incredibly-hard-to-find niche specialist, the truth is in the actual work, I have to put my generalist hat and interface with existing systems.
Example: I am implementing a state-of the art semantically annotated software specification platform that can pretty much generate code for from the specification (thinK Ruby on Rails + Rspec but language independent)
In order to implement this I have to fix bugs in PHP software, (re)write some basic XML parser in Java, configure Amazon instance to host that and then maybe write a few wiki articles and powerpoint slides to sell the concept internally.
To sum up, while I probably got the job due to my specialist expertise, I only use 30% of the time and the truth about every good contractor is that they have to be very flexible and deliver quantifiable results from day one.
A contractor might be a specialist, but he needs to have some basic accounting skills, salesman abilities to get more contracts, managerial prowess to deliver and juggle without supervision.
That's why the shift is happening - not because contractors are specialist, but because you are getting better quality for the price - you don't have to worry about sick days, maternity etc.
As long as the rates remain competitive, I much prefer to be my own boss and take the burden of managing everything myself - that way my end client get quality services and I get a bit more money or a bit more free time.
Last year due to recession my time on the bench was 4 months.
Some don't take the stress lightly, but I just treated it as vacation and a time to improve myself.

[Kanye]

Would be interested in speaking with you. You didn't leave contact details though :-)

[ThomasSoerensen]

did you write Narnia?